[ZESTCaste] WAITING FOR THE MESSIAH

Mon, 30 Jan 2006 01:39:21 -0800

 
WAITING FOR THE MESSIAH 
The UP Congress is still fighting shy of wooing the backward castes, hoping to be saved by the first family, writes Tapas Chakraborty
 
 
Easy way out 
Congressmen in the country may have spotted a messiah in Rahul Gandhi, but they would have been better advised to consolidate the party’s organization before fawning over Rahul in the Hyderabad plenary session.
The crisis that faces the party in states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar springs from the lack of motivation among party members. They have so far been unable to bring about a youth resurgence in the state units of the party. A sense of desperation seems to have prompted these leaders, mostly from the heartland states, to seek a public declaration of his commitment from their reluctant messiah.
The belief in a messiah has not only become deeply ingrained in the culture of the Congress, but it also appears to reinforce their faith in the dawn of a messianic age which will see the return of single-party rule. A few senior Congressmen, after returning from the plenary recalled how Rahul was pestered to become a Congress working committee member.
On the face of it, the Congressmen cannot be blamed. For the party has always benefited from its workers’ belief in a messiah, real or fake, be it during the time of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi. However, the party suffered when power got over-centralized, and this prompted the birth of powerful regional chiefs.
Facing a near rout in north India now, more specifically in UP and Bihar, the new generation of regional satraps want to bask in the remaining sunshine of the first family of the Congress. Fortunately, Rahul Gandhi wants to take a hard look at history and does not want to fall into the trap set by the regional leaders of his party.
Both Rahul and his mother, the party president, Sonia Gandhi, do not want to jump into the rabble-rousing exercise now, ignoring the ills of the present party organization. Even the caste leaders projected by the party in UP and Bihar got quickly alienated from the people who had elected them, amassing enormous wealth and indulging in corrupt practices..
These leaders have long been discarded by the electorate, but they remain unfazed, smug in the belief that the first family is responsible in the event of both victory and defeat, while they remain the powermongers without having to shoulder any responsibility.
Sonia Gandhi referred to the lifestyle and lavish weddings of Congress leaders and their wards in Hyderabad, and she suggested the introduction of a moral code of conduct. But ordinary party workers in UP were the last to heed the suggestion. They were busy pointing fingers at the Samajwadi Party leaders. But the truth is that the Samajwadi Party leaders have just begun to emulate their peers in the Congress.
The Congress first lost power in 1977 in UP. But this defeat, obviously a fallout of the Emergency, did not mark any major erosion of the party’s support base in the state. The decline began in the late Eighties — between then and the mid Nineties, the Congress lost four polls. The local satraps stood exposed. In the 1996 polls, the Congress got a mere 8 per cent of the total votes, a huge drop from 31 per cent in 1989 and 51 per cent in 1984.
The party’s recent embarrassment came from an assembly by-poll in Allahabad, the cradle of Congress politics, where it had got a little over 600 votes. Further, the party failed to form the panchayat samity last month in Rae Bareli, Sonia Gandhi’s parliamentary constituency.
The party leaders in the state were sleeping over the rise of the other backward castes in the state in the early Nineties and their quest for participation in the power structure. They even ignored the emerging social combination of the OBC, Dalits and Muslims.
The leaders of the Congress who attempted to recognize the rise of these new social groups, defying the wrath of conservative upper-caste partymen, were sidelined in the organization. Yet, as early as the Seventies, the political disillusionment of the OBC farmers in western UP was acknowledged by Charan Singh. In the mid Eighties, of course, V.P. Singh championed the Mandal formula.
But the most resilient satraps of the Congress clung to their old ideas for fear of antagonizing the upper-caste voters, while the last of the Congress vote bank withered away in the wake of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s temple movement. The first challenge came from the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party and then the BJP. With no space left for the party in the state, the Congress remained confined to Amethi, Rae Bareli and a handful of other seats.
The party is still not able to face challenges to the caste representation within the organization. A backward-caste leader was given responsibility as party president sometime back, but he was found travelling alone in the villages without much support from the senior upper-caste leaders.
The Congress, like its communist allies, tends to believe that caste cannot be allowed to be the basis of political organization. A few leaders who privately acknowledge this are not bold enough to put this on the agenda of the party. “Whatever else the long plans for reviving its fortunes in UP, it will inevitably have to address the caste conundrum”, wrote Salman Khurshid, now president of the UPCC, sometime back in an article titled “Sleeping giant”. Why then is he not taking the bull by its horns?
The BJP, BSP, and Samajwadi Party are going all out to woo the backward castes — something the Congress is still fighting shy of. With no formula to regain lost ground, Congress workers cannot but look for a messiah from the Nehru-Gandhi family.
A rather reluctant Rahul Gandhi, dragged into vote politics in 2004, opened a window of hope for the party leaders amidst chaos and crisis. But he maintains a distance from the regional chiefs. When he visits Amethi, no local leaders are seen hovering around him. The first-time MP from Amethi had a taste of ugly rivalries among the regional leaders demonstrating in front of camps in both Chitrakoot and Gorakhpur where he had launched efforts to induct fresh blood in the party last year. He had heard young aspirants airing frustration over the way they were marginalized in the party, the way party polls were shelved on some pretext or another, how backward caste members were not encouraged to take over from the elders. The state organization is still sitting on a proposal to induct district presidents from those who had participated in Rahul’s youth training camps.
Even as the party workers campaign on the possible coming of a messiah in Rahul Gandhi, he has clearly warned the state leaders and party workers. “Don’t think just because I am around, everything will become easy for you. You yourself have to take initiatives, reach out to people and win them over,” he said both in Chitrakoot and Gorakhpur.
“He will not be around till we have a team ready for him. A team of young but forgotten leaders, preferably from the rural areas”, said a senior party leader. This may be the reason why Rahul Gandhi has not bothered to visit the Congress party office in Lucknow even once though he visits Amethi every month.
 

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